Tourette syndrome, also known as Tourette’s syndrome or simply Tourette’s, is a brain disorder that affects connective in the hypothalamus region of the brain. Individuals with Tourette’s experience tics, which are body movements or sounds that occur unpredictably and intermittently.
A person with Tourette’s may exhibit normal behavior the vast majority of the time. However, the onset and amount of tics displayed is unpredictable and the quantity varies. Some days a person with Tourette’s may experience a great number of tics while the next day, they may experience only a few.
To be diagnosed with Tourette’s, the individual must experience both motor and vocal tics for an extended period of time. Shoulder shrugging, facial grimacing, eye blinking, and head jerking are motor tics. Examples of vocal tics would include sniffing, throat clearing, yelping, tongue clicking, and other noises.
Two of the most common tics for individuals with Tourette’s are throat clearing and eye blinking. Other tics people with Tourette’s experience include facial movements, coughing, humming, sniffing, grunting, and shoulder shrugging. Obsessions, compulsions, impulsivity, inattention, and mood variability can also be characteristics of the disorder.
Tourette’s is the most severe of spectrum of tic disorders. There are two categories of tics, simple and complex. Example of more complex motor tics would be smelling, jumping, touching other people or things, twirling about, or more rarely self-injurious actions such as hitting one’s own head as biting oneself. More complex vocal tics are using socially unacceptable words in public or uttering words or phrases out of context. This is known as coprolalia.
Coprolalia is the commonly associated symptom of Tourette’s as it is frequently used in portraying people with the disorder in movies, television, and other forms of media. Other symptoms of Tourette’s include echolalia, which is the repeating the words of other people, and palilalia, which is repeating one own words.
With Tourette’s, the tics can arrive suddenly and vary in type. However, the tics associated with the disorder are temporarily suppressible, in contrast to other movement disorders. This is evident in the fact that older children and adults are much better able to control their tics than younger children, when Tourette’s syndrome symptoms are typically most pronounced. Learn more about Tourette’s syndrome at http://www.tourettessyndrome.org.